Posts Tagged ‘Scheduling’

Years ago I remember Dad telling me how every task in the eyes of one of his bosses was “priority one,” which eventually prompted my dad to ask said boss to please clarify what was “priority one alpha,” “priority one beta,” “priority one gamma,” and so on.

L’s Mother and I do our best to keep this idea in mind in our daily routines, but lately her job has necessitated priorities above “priority one alpha” which she has dubbed “OMG alpha,” “OMG beta,” and “OMG gamma.”

Now that things have settled down somewhat for the summer, I’ve been hammering out what is intended to be a workable and balanced schedule for myself. This would be a challenge for me alone, but my son makes it even more so. (But he also provides the motivation for me to make this work, so it all balances out.) So far what I have feels worryingly easy on some days, and just barely doable on others.

But, unfortunately, my three-word plan for a “relaxing day off” became shorted to a two-word plan of “day off” before I even reached noon, and by nightfall, despite everyone’s best efforts, it barely qualified as an unqualified(1) “day,” much less a “day off.”

Recently I stopped pretending that my stress level was anything less than worrisome. I mean I’ve known this for a while now, but I kept dismissing it as “just something that comes along with parenthood.” It wasn’t until I started organizing my schedule a bit more by color coding the importance of given tasks with a simple green-yellow-red level of critical importance that I noticed something that brought it all home for me.

There were no green “Everything in this category is fine” tasks on my list, everything on my list was some shade of yellow or red, and those colors only deepened as the list grew longer day by day. As things stood, not only was I looking at a “no win” situation, I could no longer deny that I had been in a “no win” situation for some time now.

Obviously a change was in order.

But first I decided I needed a break from the stress, and that a relaxing day off would do me enough good to easily balance out ignoring my failing and flailing schedule for one day, allowing me to come back fresh to start making the necessary changes to get out of my “no win” spiral.